Problem with Martain Rover reveiled

[GT98]

Pretty good article here:

http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20040220S0046

[Jon P. Inghram]

On a related note my cable modem, a Motorola Surfboard 4100, uses the same operating system as the rovers, VxWorks version 5.3.

[The PIT]

Sounds like a typical cock up. Luckily they were able to re-activate spirit otherwise someone wouldn't have been very popular and heads could have rolled.

[schmosef]

Originally posted by The PIT
Sounds like a typical cock up. Luckily they were able to re-activate spirit otherwise someone wouldn't have been very popular and heads could have rolled.

A typical cock up for fresh out of school newbie programmers. Handling file allocation exceptions is a trivial case study scenario taught in most intro to computer science courses.

Ok, ok. I don't know enough of the back story of how much work went into this mission so I won't blather on about this oversight but I have to say that for the multibillion dollar price tag, the US taxpayers should be able to expect a higher degree of proficiency than this.

edit: reworked a sentence for clarification

[cjolley]

Yup, far from something that could not have been anticipated, this was a completely run-of-the-mill software design flaw.
Had it been something silly like an infinite loop, that would have been news.
But, one part of the system just assuming something else worked, well, I write code like that every day.
One does not expect that in the core of an operating system, or a .5 billion $ machine.
chuck


PS and even I never do that in any part of the system that involves MONEY.

[The PIT]

Makes you wonder what testing they do and how good there procedures are. Fancy forgetting you only managed to upload part of the code.